This collection brings together a range of international contributors to stimulate discussions on time and international human rights law, a topic that has been given little attention to date. The book explores how time and its diverse forms can be understood to operate on, and in, this area of law; how time manifests in the theory and practice of human rights law internationally; and how specific areas of human rights can be understood via temporal analyses. A range of temporal ideas and their connection to this area of law are investigated. These include collective memory, ideas of past, present and future, emergency time, the times of environmental change, linearity and non-linearity, multiplicitous time, and the connections between time and space or materiality. Rather than a purely abstract or theoretical endeavour, this dedicated attention to the times and temporalities of international human rights law will assist in better understanding this law, its development, and its operation in the present. What emerges from the collection is a future – or, more precisely, futures – for time as a vehicle of analysis for those working within human rights law internationally.

This book explores times, spaces and imaginings relating to international law through the lens of queer theory. For some time now, queer theorists and legal scholars who think with queer theory have asked, what happens when queer theory moves out of its home base of gender and sexuality? The chapters in this book begin to answer this question by applying insights from queer theory to a diverse array of international law topics, from travaux préparatoires and international judging to the environment, oceans and outer space. While some contributions maintain a focus on gender and sexual diversity, all are characterised by a shift away from questions about LGBTIQA+ people towards wider discussions about power, normality, difference and liberation in international law. Through these engagements, the book demonstrates how queer theory can provide insights into a range of international law issues by allowing us to ‘make strange’ the taken-for-granted and contributing to a broader practice of reading for difference rather than dominance. The book engages with contemporary challenges in international law, from the climate crisis to new military technologies, such as automated naval vessels. It also showcases the diversity of approaches to queering international law that are emerging, with some authors drawing attention to the violence of (neo-)colonial international law and others engaging in more utopian and reparative thinking. This collection of queer theoretical engagements with international law will be invaluable to scholars of international law and international relations with an interest in critical approaches to these areas; as well as to researchers, activists and practitioners working in cultural, gender, queer and/or postcolonial studies.

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a peer-review mechanism, reviewing all 193 UN Member States’ protection and promotion of human rights. After ten years of the existence of the UPR mechanism, this collection examines the effectiveness of the UPR, theoretical and conceptual debates about its modus operandi, and the lessons that can be drawn across different regions/states to identify possible improvements. The book argues that despite its limitations, the UPR mechanism with its inclusive, cooperative, and collaborative framework, is an important human rights mechanism with the potential to evolve over time into an effective cooperative tool for monitoring human rights implementation. Divided into three parts, the first part focuses on exploring a variety of theoretical approaches to understanding the UPR mechanism. The second part examines specific human rights themes and the relationship between the UPR mechanism and other international mechanisms. Finally, the third part questions implementation and the ways in which states/regional groupings have engaged with the UPR mechanism and what lessons can be learned for the future. The volume will be a valuable resource for researchers, academics, and policymakers working in the area of international human rights law, international organizations, and international relations. We would like to acknowledge the UPR Academic Network (UPRAN) for bringing together the experts on this project and the University of Stirling for providing funds to facilitate open access dissemination for parts of this output.

This book challenges the correspondence theory of judicial fact construction – that legal rules resemble and subsume facts ‘out there’ – and instead provides an account of judicial fact construction through legally produced times- or adjudicative temporalities- that structure legal subject and event formation in legal judgement. Drawing on Bergsonian and Gadamerian theories of time, this book details how certain adjudicative temporalities can produce fully willed and autonomous subjects through ‘time framed’ legal events – in effect, the paradigmatic liberal legal subject – or how alternative adjudicative temporalities may structure legal subjects that are situated and constituted by social structures. The consequences of this novel account of legal judgement are fourfold. The first is that judicial fact construction is not exclusively determined by the legal rule (s) but by adjudication’s production of temporalities. The second is that the selection between different adjudicative temporalities is generally indeterminate, though influenced by wider social structures. As will be argued, social structures, framed as a particular type of past produced by certain adjudicative temporalities, may either be incorporated in the rendering of the legal event or elided. The third is that, with the book’s focus on criminal law, different deployments of adjudicative temporalities effect responsibility ascription. Finally, it is argued that the demystification of time as that which structures event and subject formation reveals another way in which to uncover the politics of legal judgement and the potential for its transformative potential, through either its inclusion or its elision of social structures in adjudication’s determination of facts. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the field of legal judgement, legal theory and jurisprudence.

This book provides a critical assessment of how judges reason in the adjudication of historical injustices. The practice of adjudication in historical cases of injustice require that, in determining collective responsibility, judges impart meaning to past injuries. This book analyses the narrative mechanisms through which this meaning is produced. Focusing on three areas of adjudication–racial discrimination, post-colonial extractivism and the climate crisis–the book’s analysis focuses on the issue of time. It considers the interplay of how historical injustice adjudication is shaped by temporal presuppositions and how it enacts a particular idea of temporality. As experiences of injustice are narrated, the book demonstrates how some of those experiences are included and others are excluded within the process of adjudication. Drawing on legal theory, legal epistemology and the philosophy of time, the book thus offers an instructive, and provocative, account of how collective responsibility is determined in cases of historical injustice. This book will appeal to scholars working in the fields of legal theory, legal reasoning, socio-legal studies, comparative jurisprudence and transitional justice.

This book explores the close, complex and consequential – yet to a large extent implicit – relationship between international law and time. There is a conspicuous discrepancy between international law’s technical preoccupation with the mechanics of temporal rules and the absence of more foundational considerations of how time – both as an irrepressible physical dimension manifesting in the passage of time, and as a social construct shaped by diverse social and cultural factors – impacts and interacts with international law. Divided into five parts and 21 chapters, this book explores key aspects of the relationship between international law and time and puts the spotlight on time’s fundamental significance for international law as a legal order and as a discipline. Pursuing diverse approaches to international law, the authors consider the notion, significance, manifestations, uses and implications of time in international law in a wide range of contexts, and offer insights into the various ways in which international law and international lawyers cope with time, both in terms of constructing narratives and in devising and employing particular legal techniques.

What does the UK's exit from the EU mean for health and the NHS? This book explains the legal and practical implications of Brexit on the NHS: its staffing; especially on the island of Ireland; medicines, medical devices and equipment; and biomedical research. It considers the UK's post-Brexit trade agreements and what they mean for health, and discusses the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on post-Brexit health law. To put the legal analysis in context, the book draws on over 400 conversations the authors had with people in the north of England and Northern Ireland, interviews with over 40 health policy stakeholders, details of a film about their research made with ShoutOut UK, the authors' work with Parliaments and governments across the UK, and their collaborations with key actors like the NHS Confederation, the British Medical Association, and Cancer Research UK. The book shows that the language people use to talk about hoped-for legitimate post-Brexit health governance suggests a great deal of faith in law and legal process among 'ordinary people', but the opposite from 'insider elites'. Not What The Bus Promised puts the authors' knowledge and experiences centre frame, rather than claiming to express 'objective reality'. It will be of interest to any reader who cares about the NHS and wants to understand its present and future.

This collection brings together a range of international contributors to stimulate discussions on time and international human rights law, a topic that has been given little attention to date. The book explores how time and its diverse forms can be understood to operate on, and in, this area of law; how time manifests in the theory and practice of human rights law internationally; and how specific areas of human rights can be understood via temporal analyses. A range of temporal ideas and their connection to this area of law are investigated. These include collective memory, ideas of past, present and future, emergency time, the times of environmental change, linearity and non-linearity, multiplicitous time, and the connections between time and space or materiality. Rather than a purely abstract or theoretical endeavour, this dedicated attention to the times and temporalities of international human rights law will assist in better understanding this law, its development, and its operation in the present. What emerges from the collection is a future – or, more precisely, futures – for time as a vehicle of analysis for those working within human rights law internationally.